Magistrate Prods City to Settle Remap Case

The effort to resolve a Latino voting rights lawsuit without a long and costly trial took a new turn Friday when seven City Council members met privately with a U.S. magistrate, who urged them to settle the case.

But the approximately half-hour session--at which the council members were ordered to appear--did little to heal the divisions between two bitterly opposed factions: the City Council and the Chicano Federation of San Diego County, which filed the class-action lawsuit against the council in 1988.

Throughout the week, U.S. Magistrate Harry McCue met with lawyers for the council and the federation in hopes of reaching a settlement, which, at midweek, had appeared imminent. On Thursday afternoon, when a compromise agreement essentially collapsed, he ordered the council to Friday morning’s session, but told those involved to keep it secret.

McCue told the seven members who attended--Mayor Maureen O’Connor and Councilwoman Judy McCarty were out of town--that it would be in everyone’s best interest to settle the case and urged them to approve the proposed settlement that had fallen through the day before, according to some of the lawyers and council members present.

After meeting with all seven council members, McCue met with them individually and in small groups. Councilman Bob Filner, who represents the key Latino 8th District, his lawyer and others presented McCue with a counterproposal, a map with yet another configuration of the district.

McCue called Michael Aguirre, the lawyer for the Chicano Federation, and asked him to study the new proposal. But Aguirre, after analyzing the plan most of the day, rejected it.

With the rejection came a return to the bellicose rhetoric that had previously marked negotiations.

“We’re in a litigation mode now,” Aguirre said at a late-afternoon press conference. He said five members of the council who voted for a disputed redistricting map last month and reaffirmed that decision last week have been served subpoenas. In all, he said, about 40 subpoenas will be issued, and the first depositions will begin Wednesday morning.

The process of sworn interrogations will last about six weeks, Aguirre said. A trial will probably begin in November on the federation’s contention that the council majority conspired to circumvent a previous settlement agreement and, in doing so, violated the federal Voting Rights Act, he said.

Aguirre said he sees little likelihood of a settlement now “unless the five (members of the majority bloc) back away from group think . . . because Filner will never agree to a district where a Latino has a reasonable chance of winning. . . . His incumbency is at stake.”

Aguirre said Filner “has proposed a very clever proposal that has the appearance of a Latino district but not the reality of it.”

Filner was not available for comment after the press conference, but earlier in the day he said, “Aguirre is full of (expletive).”

“We made what we thought was a counteroffer” that boosted the percentage of the Latino population in the district close to what Aguirre had proposed, Filner said, adding that he expects both proposals to be presented to the City Council in closed session Tuesday.

Filner and colleagues Linda Bernhardt and John Hartley had rejected Aguirre’s plan because it would have taken the community of Nestor, which has a white majority, out of the South Bay and the largely Latino 8th District, and put it in District 2 by way of a line drawn through San Diego Bay.

They said that, not only is Nestor geographically and politically separate from District 2, which mainly represents residents in Point Loma and Mission Hills, but that such a division could potentially lead to racial strife in the South Bay.

Aguirre and the federation called the contention preposterous.

The counterproposal unveiled Friday by Filner and his attorney, David Lundin, would keep Nestor in District 8. It would increase the Latino population in the district largely by shifting a portion of downtown--situated immediately southwest of Balboa Park and containing about 8,000 people, most of them white--into District 3; moving another neighborhood, mainly black, into District 4, and putting the Harbor View-Little Italy neighborhood near the bay into District 8.

According to Filner, the counteroffer places the percentage of Latinos in the 8th District at 53.5%, higher than the 51.9% on the map approved by the five-member majority.

Aguirre, working with Leo Estrada, an associate professor of urban planning at UCLA and a recognized expert on census data and demographics, said the federation’s proposal--the one that splits away Nestor--puts the Latino population at about 54.1%.

Aguirre, Estrada and the federation were asked why a compromise cannot be reached and why a lengthy trial that could cost at least $2 million cannot be avoided if what separates the two sides is a figure of less than 1%.

Estrada said that, although the two proposals are close numerically, the differences in the configuration of the districts--what’s out and what’s in--are significant.

“We achieved the same results in two different ways,” said Estrada, who, working for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union, drafted a redistricting map for supervisorial districts in Los Angeles County. That map was accepted by a federal court there as part of a similar Latino voting rights lawsuit.

The reasons for the federation’s rejection of Filner’s counterproposal may seem arcane for most laymen, but Aguirre and Estrada said the differences are real and seriously affect the probability of a Latino being elected to the City Council.

Estrada said it is in the federation’s best interest to keep the 8,000 people next to Balboa Park in the 8th District. Even though most of them are white, Latinos constitute a significant minority and are a “stable” population, he said.

In contrast, Estrada said, the Harbor View-Little Italy area, also composed of several thousand residents--most of them white but again with a large Latino minority--is in transition, and demographic projections show it will become more white and thus dilute Latino strength in the 8th District.

In addition, Estrada said the counteroffer’s plan to move a census tract into the 7th District is a detriment because analysis shows Latino growth is moving east toward Lemon Grove and that the 8th District outlined in the new proposal would not take advantage of that.

Lastly, Estrada said that taking Nestor out of the South Bay is not without precedent. He said the state 79th Assembly District does just that, taking it out of San Ysidro and placing it with Coronado and Point Loma.

Earlier in the day, Filner said his offer was part of an effort to avoid a trial. He said that, in the interest of compromise, he gave up the southwest Balboa Park neighborhood even though “I didn’t want to give downtown.”

Late in the day Friday, attorney Lundin--who represents Filner, Hartley and Bernhardt--sent Aguirre a letter in which he appealed to him to discuss “the merits of this case quietly and responsibly.”

“Our clients have proposed a map which comes so close to yours that the differences are no longer statistically significant,” Lundin said in the letter, shown to Aguirre during his press conference. “ . . . The map as put forward contains a number of compromises and sacrifices on the part of our clients and was done in the hope that you would be willing to make at least a change in your otherwise hard and fast position.”